“The policemen were humiliating us and laughing at us . They were beating us and joking while doing it. They were saying: “Fuck you! Fuck muslims! Muslims are animals”. They put us all in a line and made us sit down. They were asking each of us where we were from. During this they were still hitting us. It didn't matter if you were in the beginning or in the middle of the line. Whenever they felt like hitting you they would hit you. If one of us was sitting in a different way or if the line wasn't straight they would drag them out of the line they would beat them and push them back saying: “Sit straight!”. In my whole life I've never been that scared. I've never been beaten this way and I've never seen anyone that was beaten this way.” /from a testimony collected by Fresh Response in North-Serbia/ full testimony: http://www.migszol.com/border-violence

Since the summer of 2016 reports about police brutality and human rights abuses done against people trying to cross the Serbian-Hungarian borders have dramatically increased. Characterically blunt, the government even officially called a special police unit deployed since February 2017 at the border with Serbia ‘border hunters’. In parallel with the establishment of the border hunter unit new laws were introduced, which enable the Hungarian police to push-back people from the whole territory of the country and thus make the abuses less visible.

The violence have been documented in detail, and have been proven by NGOs and volunteers to be systematic and repetitive. People who cross the border are captured by uniformed groups who injure people severely, stripping them of their phones, taking away warm clothes and letting dogs on them. After the physical and verbal violence, many people are forced by the uniformed groups to record a short film saying that they were not abused.

We wrote to the Ministry of Interior about this, demanding a response on the severe issue. Many people joined us in this fight by sending emails to the Ministry.

Despite the evidence published by countless media and NGOs, the answer of the ministry is very short: they deny any abuse happening at the border. Given the amount of reports and articles on the topic, it is very worrying that there is no transparent investigation of the violence. While we generally advocate for the reestablishment of access to protection through the abolition of the recently introduced laws and see them connected to the violence, we want to emphasize the urgency of the physical violence at the border, which seems to remain unrecognized by the ministry. As a first step it would be particularly important to ensure that the Hungarian police with the newly recruited and barely trained Border Hunter unit is acting with full commitment for protecting human integrity and respecting human rights.

We demand to investigate the violence against asylum-seekers and migrants and publish a transparent report on the investigations. Stop the violence!